


Belief, Faith

by magicites



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Kingdom Hearts III, Somewhat compliant to the BBS novels, this is super self indulgent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 19:03:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18666469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicites/pseuds/magicites
Summary: "You're awfully quiet," Ventus observes. "You good?"Vanitas is. He couldn't be more good. That's where the problem lies. He doesn’t understand how this love can remain - it makes him furious, how little he understands it. It's too good to ever stay.





	Belief, Faith

**Author's Note:**

> don't look at me i just put a single song on repeat for two hours and wrote this

_I remember you closing the shutters and laying down by my side_

_And the light that was just slipping through was painting your body in stripes_

_I remember the trees summoned down like an archangel choir_

_And the ocean was all we could see and I knew that I wanted you_

 

_[When am I gonna lose you?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_pyoACuBIw) _

 

 

“It’s better that we don’t travel at night. Even if no one’s on those paths, they still wind a lot. Makes me nervous,” Ventus says as he draws the blinds shut. The room they’ve rented for the night is threadbare in its layout. There’s a bed, a desk, a nightstand with a single lamp, and a lone dresser. The connected bathroom has a few towels and some complimentary toiletries, but that’s it.

Vanitas doesn’t speak, because it’s not worth arguing over. Their vacation isn’t quite over yet, not until tomorrow evening when they have to be back home and face their monotonous reality of their peaceful castle once more. The lamp emits just enough light to see Ventus’s yawn as much as he hears it. His shadow stretches behind him, mingling with the darkness Vanitas casts on the wall with effortless ease. Noticing this, Ventus makes a wolf with his hands and pretends to eat Vanitas’s hair. He tries to howl, but only laughter escapes his mouth.

They spent hours walking along the coastline of Neverland’s islands that day. They watched the endlessly glittering sea, a rippling wave of sapphires that stretched on into infinity. There was no need for words then, not when they had bright birdsong and the gentle rustling of leaves over their heads. There was one jutting rock that they climbed up where they could see the bridge they carefully crossed earlier curve tall and proud from the mountain it came from. Wood melted to grass, which tumbled down the cliffside and danced among the rocky shore. The sky hung gray and heavy over their heads, but even in the silence, all they could see was life.

They could never capture that picture in words. They could never try.

The picture of Ventus now, glowing golden under a single light and laughing at absolutely nothing, is just as beautiful. He doesn’t carry the grand beauty of nature. He isn’t tall like the evergreens of the city they now stay in, crisp with the scent of fresh pine all around them. He isn’t powerful like the waves crashing against the rocky shores, able to reduce even the tallest mountain to rubble.

But the beauty found here is just as breathtaking. Vanitas watches him, transfixed. He could devour dictionaries and tear through thesauruses for the rest of his life, but there aren’t words in any language that are enough to describe how he feels.

“You’re awfully quiet,” Ventus observes, letting his shadow-wolf run back into the forest. He drifts over to their bed and slips under the covers. “You good?”

He is. He couldn’t be more good. That’s where the problem lies. Ventus’s hand comes to rest against Vanitas’s face, thumb rubbing circles against the highest part of his cheekbone. His hand, like the rest of him, is warm. He’s always warm, constantly providing a comforting heat to Vanitas’s chilled soul. Vanitas reaches for Ventus’s other hand and brings it to his lips, kissing his knuckles as gently as his battle-weary bones can manage. Ventus smiles like the sun on a spring afternoon.

What he doesn’t understand is the overwhelming complexity of this feeling. He is so utterly, ridiculously, completely _enamoured_ with this boy. The good constantly, consistently, eternally outweighs the bad. It has since the moment Vanitas took his hand and allowed himself to be led away from a life spent amongst a graveyard. He no longer haunts the dead.

He didn’t realize it was possible for love to crash over him with the sheer force that it has. It’s more powerful than rage, than jealousy, than hatred, than anything and everything that drove him on his relentless chase across the worlds to fill the void in his heart. Even the snatches of positivity he felt (and still feels) from the one-way connection wrapped around Ventus was only ever that: snatches, glimpses into a life he was never allowed to believe in.

This isn’t a balance that can remain tipped so heavily in Vanitas’s favor for much longer. Nothing good remains. Nothing good can stay. What will be the final straw that pushes Ventus away? How is Vanitas going to lose the brightest point of light in his life?

This love so powerful. It _hurts_.

“We should probably go to bed,” Ventus says, tilting his head to glance at the lamp behind him. His face is wreathed in shadows, but his hair forms a golden halo against their shared pillow. “But I don’t want to turn the light off yet.”

“Nightmares?” Vanitas asks. Ventus gets them sometimes. Vanitas does as well, now that he’s more than a sliver of darkness desperate to stab into his chest.

“I haven’t had any recently.” That’s true; he hasn’t woken Vanitas up with his tossing and turning for the better part of a month. “I just like looking at you like this. The way the light shines in your eyes - it’s really cool. Mark of darkness or not.”

His eyes were red, once. Before he was given a face he never asked for. _Their_ eyes were blue, before that, but Vanitas thinks he prefers the way they share their existence now to what a shared body would have made them into.

Vanitas would prefer red once more, but if Ventus likes the gold, then he supposes it can stay. Ventus’s eyes are so bright, crisp and shining like the sky on a clear day. “I like yours,” Vanitas mutters softly.

“Mine? Come on. Five other people have the exact same color.”

“But none of them are you,” Vanitas insists. None of them would touch his face with such tenderness or wrap themselves around him in a silent promise that _you do not need to be born for battle, not any longer._

“I guess.” Ventus’s hand still lingers by his mouth, so he kisses it once more. These gentle touches were once so foreign, but he finds that he craves them now. No longer does he jump when Aqua ruffles his hair, or when Terra throws an arm around his shoulders, or when Ventus pulls him close.

He’s still too embarrassed, too much of a feral animal whose only just learned how to come indoors to seek out the gentle affection he wants so desperately from the others. Ventus is different. He always has been. He is easy to push, easy to pull, easier to tear himself open for and lay every sin bare for him to see.

Vanitas keeps waiting for Ventus to find the sin that will force him to draw away for good. He keeps a bag of clothes tucked away under their shared bed for when that day comes. When Ventus wants him to leave, he will. No questions asked. He’ll take a dark portal back to the Badlands and bleed himself dry of Unversed until he’s nothing but a husk.

Then that husk will pick itself up off the ground, open a new portal, and find a world closer to the water to live out the remainder of its pathetic existence. Maybe Xion will drag him to Twilight Town to stay with her friends. Maybe Sora will take him to the islands where Vanitas’s life inadvertently began and help him build anew.

Or maybe they’ll see what finally scared Ventus away and rightly keep their distance.

Until then, he leans into the gentle affection that settles in the back of his mind. Ventus’s emotions are always muted, filtered as an echo of the original feeling. What were once intruders are valued guests now, Vanitas welcoming them easily into the corners of his mind. Vanitas can’t feel every emotion; only the strongest ones can carry that journey between selves.

Ventus can never feel what Vanitas does. That’s what he gets by being made whole by others, not the half whittled down to a splinter. Ventus makes him use his words when he’s good and his Unversed when he’s not. Ventus is no longer afraid of the creatures, no longer vicious towards them the way they were once vicious towards him.

They follow Vanitas’s command, and never again will Vanitas let him hurt by his own hand.

That thumb still brushes against his cheek. Ventus never stopped touching him. “Can you come a little closer?” he asks. The thrum of affection in the back of Vanitas’s mind grows louder, each beat heavier with the drumming of his heart. Whose heart it follows, he isn’t sure.

He scoots forward, leaving his wariness far outside of this tiny room. He is afraid of himself, of what he could do to Ventus were he to lose too much control, more than he’s afraid of Ventus. This boy is a fierce warrior in his own right, vicious enough to shatter his own heart to shards of broken glass if it meant protecting those he loved, but he left his armor to hang by the door.

His calloused palms, a reminder of the dream he still chases after, cup both of Vanitas’s cheeks as he kisses him. The ways battle has hardened his body - lithe muscles, bird-thin bones, knotted scars tracing his chest and back - never reached his lips, soft like silk against Vanitas’s own. The drum of affection bursts in the back of his mind, showering him with a drizzle of the emotion Ventus currently feels. That terrifies him just as much.

He knows how easy it is to turn such a heady love into hatred. He did it to Ventus a lifetime ago, plucking the sour strings of his loyalty towards Terra against his love of Aqua until the woman who would lay her life down for him was barely more than an enemy. It was easy to ruin that love. How much easier would it be to ruin this love?

“I can almost hear you thinking too hard,” Ventus whispers, pulling away. There’s just enough light to see how flushed his cheeks are. “What’s going on?”

His fears scatter from his light, burrowing into all the corners of himself that he can’t see. He keeps the light on and claws at their covers, dragging them out once more. “I don’t get it. How can everything just be okay?”

“Well, we defeated the bad guy and saved all the worlds. We worked hard for this. We’re allowed to have things be okay.”

Vanitas squirms. Ventus’s love remains in the back of his mind, gently coaxing him to give back in. “No. I know that. I mean- you. And me. This. How can this be okay? How can you like me so much?”

Worry blankets over that love, tucking it into a tight little ball. One of the hands on Vanitas’s cheek moves up to his hair to run through it. “I don’t really know. I just do. Things are complicated enough. Can’t this be simple?”

Frustrated, Vanitas bites back a snarl. No matter what he says, he can’t get close enough to what he truly wants to communicate. He tries again. “Life doesn’t get to be pretty and perfect. Don’t you get that?”

There’s annoyance, in the flat line of Ventus’s mouth and the emotion that strips his worry away. It cleans the previous emotion off like someone cleans out an old room, throwing everything in a corner to be disposed of later. “Someone’s cranky. Go to bed, Vanitas. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

That’s all it’ll take to make Ventus’s love flee for a better heart to have and to hold. Enough of these small arguments, these pinpricks of negativity, can be enough to break even someone as stubborn as Ventus. This will be how Vanitas finally loses him. Not a grand battle, but a quiet war.

Ventus kisses him once again, with just enough bite to make him shudder and gasp. His emotions shine clearest when they connect like that, dissolving a layer of the barrier that keeps Ventus as _Ventus_ and Vanitas as _Vanitas_.

That love remains the brightest light, no less powerful than before. Vanitas doesn’t understand how it can remain - it makes him furious, how little he understands it.

But his fury is washed away as Ventus rolls over, flicks the lamp off, and scoots back until they’re pressed together. Vanitas wraps an arm around his middle and buries his nose into the back of Ventus’s hair, letting contentment that isn’t his own wash over him in waves.

Sleep comes easily, once Vanitas finally sets his frantic mind to rest. Dreams, both painful and pleasant, evade him throughout the night. He wakes to strands of sunlight filtering through the cracks between the blinds, painting rays of color over the sleeping body that he still holds tight.

Ventus was right. He does feel better now.

The love that fills every nerve in his body is still overwhelming in its sheer power, but he isn’t alone in that feeling, is he?

They return to the cliffs of Neverland after a quiet breakfast in the city. Ventus swirls and eddies along the edges of the cliffside, moving as if caught in a dance. Vanitas watches him, silhouetted by the endless sea, and wonders once more how things ever got to become so good.


End file.
